Once and future Latimer Core: status update and open conversation

What this was about

Sharon Grant updated the room on the Latimer Core maintenance group, which meets monthly and describes intentionally grouped things ('Latimer Core is to groups as Darwin Core is to individual occurrences'). Users asked for structure to implement it, which required identifiers; the group discovered that term IRIs obtained at ratification were duplicated with different meanings because of its generic 'has identifier' structure, conflicting with TDWG's globally scoped IRIs. After the group asked TDWG whether standards could formally include structure, TDWG agreed, following Darwin Core DP and Camtrap DP, so Latimer Core is building an LTC DP structure layer for public review later in the year (after MIDS), with a conceptual/relationship layer still to come.

Why it matters. The change affects how TDWG standards are defined generally and determines whether collection-level data can be implemented in machines like GRSciColl.

In the room

• The group moved from task group to maintenance group, meets monthly and has 15 open issues; MCZbase and another system are exploring implementation.
• URIs, IRIs and persistence were explained: persistence requires someone to maintain the string and a resolving service, which costs money.
• TDWG issues IRIs for vocabularies, documents and terms; Latimer Core found some term IRIs duplicated with different meanings.
• TDWG agreed to formalise how standards document structure (grouping and repeating terms, IRIs for statistics as in MIDS).
• LTC DP will define how terms hang together; a new ratification round and public review is planned, after MIDS.
• A conceptual layer and term relationships remain future work.
• The standard is named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the coelacanth Latimeria, deliberately honouring a woman who managed a collection.

Notable moments